My girls, born from my genes, which had been based in turn on mathematical symmetries detected in the Monument, were born with my errors, with all the faults in me that you corrected. These faults were built into the Monument by the redaction layer, the later editors who had changed the Monument.

Who or what these Monument Redactors could be, they have wrought a grievous wrong to me. Alas, my girls! They slew you. Why had Hyades done such a wrong to us?

And caring for you when you were Stinky Baby was one of the things I had which my sisters lacked. And then after. My sisters did not have you, a rock and a solid foundation for the soul, a love to be their lantern and show the path ahead.

The girls damaged the ship while experimenting on it and crippled essential systems. What they were trying to do, to this day I do not know. Their minds moved in areas beyond mine.

I saw what needed to be done to restore them, to repair the divarication. I had learned from experimenting on you. It was the same as when I was a teenager, when I was first made captain; it was the same as when I used to chase my stinky baby as he bounced, naked and laughing, from bulkhead to bulkhead, leaving balls and clouds of vomit behind him in the zero gee. My crazed genius.

But there was not enough emulation space. It could not be done even if we deleted and erased Ximen entirely from the ship’s brain. I knew what needed to be done and could not do it.

We decided to confine the girls to quarters while I experimented with growing more logic diamond in a mass towed behind the ship. The pressurized hut perched on the north pole of the Monument was the best place, for a number of reasons, not the least of which was it gave them useful work to do, and this quieted their manic-depressive cycles.

5. The Monument Core

Then they discovered the layers of Monument code hidden in the core of the sphere, and another layer hidden on a microscopic level hidden within the Monument texture, and a third layer on the molecular level, and a fourth at the atomic level, the hadron level, the lepton level, the preon level: seven levels of message occupying the entire volume of the Monument object.

Certain segments of the Monument could be used as matrices to interpret deeper volumes. At the mantle layer surrounding the core of the sphere was written the secret of how the Monument itself was constructed.

Perhaps you recall Dr. Chandrapur’s estimate of the Monument complexity. He had no idea that the whole volume in eleven dimensions is the message, with each layer written at each order of magnitude converging or diverging from the others to add additional levels of nuance. I have run the numbers. The Monument Builders were not attempting to communicate with any civilization smaller than a Kardashev III level, a civilization occupying an entire galaxy, or a precocious dwarf galaxy, and using all the matter and energy, dark matter and bright, within the volume as a calculation engine.

It is an intergalactic message.

Who wrote it? Who sent it?

The surface math is nothing more than an introduction or overture, simple enough that any mind, even mortal minds in biological bodies, can emulate and grasp it.

It is not made of normal matter occupying normal spacetime, which is why the black segments are immune to all chemical and atomic reactions, and the silver line material reflects any phenomenon propagated through timespace. The secret of its fabrication went beyond nanotechnology and picotechnology, finer than engineering molecules and atoms and hadrons and leptons. This was made by manipulating the spacetime foam itself at the Planck level. It was attotechnology.

The core itself beneath this mantle was hollow. There, buried, embedded in the black nonmatter, we detected the presence of working models of the tools of the Monument Builders.

6. The Dimensional Instruments

There were layers and samples of rare or artificial particles held in suspension, including the strangelet and the sparticle, and we saw examples of the preon, the graviton and graviphoton, the tetraquark and the pentaquark, and varied hybrid mesons, and a pure mass of what we called the glueball, which had no valence quarks at all.

The instruments of the Monument Builders consisted of five exotic-matter solids, including dark matter bodies with negative mass or imaginary mass; and within a negative mass dodecahedron were found three steady-state vibration objects, small as hadrons, made of matter-energy in configurations that do not occur in nature.

One of my twin daughters, Regina, said these three impossible objects were configurations of other possible universes which could have issued from the Big Bang but did not. In our universe, three dimensions of space and one of time unfolded from the primal singularity, with the other seven dimensions of quantum chronodynamics still folded into no larger than the Planck length, and forming the basis of the fundamental laws of nature, the fundamental ratios like pi and the square root of two. The three impossible objects, she said, were models of energy-forms left over from the Big Bang, relicts of string configurations that never emerged into our spacetime.

I said they were tools. The Monument Builders knew that the only way to reconfigure matter-energy from natural forms to these unnatural forms was only with one of the three unnatural forms. A three-dimensional tool could not flip a three-dimensional string into a four-dimensional knot, but a four-dimensional loop of string, reaching down to pull it, could.

7. Tau Leptons

I do not know what my mad daughters did, or which one of them performed the experiment, or how they smuggled the equipment from the ship’s gravitic eddy induction lance to send a needle beam through the core of the Monument, and manipulate the three impossible object samples at the core of the Monument.

The fourteen billion metric tons of the Monument unfolded briefly into eleven dimensions, a white and many-pointed star of particle streaks caught like an Escher drawing in our high-speed plates; and then it all imploded, with each particle rotated and remanifested in the form of tau leptons. These then decayed into quarks, antiquarks, and tau neutrinos in less than two-tenths of one-trillionth of a second.

Any objects on or near the Monument but not made of Monument material, such as the instruments, the pressurized hut, the life support, the library cube, the reading spiders, and, of course, all the daughters and the five men on duty as nursemaids and tutors—they all suffered instantaneous fission, during the picoseconds when the laws of nature no longer allowed for strong nuclear force to hold their electron shells steady. The atomic explosion released particles that lasted longer than tau leptons, long enough to expand outward and penetrate the push-plate armor and rake the aft with gamma radiation.

Perhaps in another universe, one with more room in one of the seven collapsed dimensions, tau leptons might have existed longer, long enough for my daughters to realize they were dying, to say a last prayer, to say good-bye. But not this universe.

8. The Suicides

The damage, physical and spiritual, could not be repaired. More systems failed as decades passed.

This ship was my home. I was born on her. Now it was a vessel of mourning. All our rites and games turned to expressions of grief.

And yet she was still the Hermetic, the greatest vessel ever to sail the stars and the dark beyond where stars end. She would not fail her mission.